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27 January 2014

i ♥ my blog: task 4 – write something epic

Today’s task is to write something epic for your blog. Spend the next few days working on an amazing blog post. Set the tone for the rest of 2014 with this fantastic article.

A lot of bloggers or website managers enter the new year with one goal in mind: traffic-building. Whether it’s “I want to increase my audience” or “I want more traffic in general,” bloggers often hone in on that traffic goal and think of little else. That’s perfectly fine—it’s a great goal, and of course we all want our audience to grow—but if we focus on a goal like that too singularly, we forget that our purpose is not building traffic.

Let me repeat that … Your purpose, as a blogger, is not to build traffic.

Your goal is to be awesome.

Let me explain. When we focus on “building traffic” as our mission, we focus on the share-factor, the generation-factor, the numbers game. What we stop focusing on, however, tends to be the thing that matters most: the people factor. We get so focused on building our numbers, we forget about delivering meaningful content for our audience. I urge you to stop focusing on the promotional element of blogging—yes, you can learn to master Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus, and so forth, but that’s not the main goal—and learn to refocus on the personal element. To put it in a word, you need to learn to be … Epic.

What does being “epic” have to do with great blogging? Simply put, it shifts the focus. When we’re focusing on numbers, we tend to focus on efficiency. Again, efficiency is great in blogging; you need to learn how to be efficient to keep yourself from going insane. But by focusing on being epic, we’re thinking a little differently. Here are some things to keep in mind to be epic:

Being personal in blogging is a two-fold work. First, to be personal means to be people-oriented. Stop focusing on the numbers and think about the people who are generating those numbers. Your reader is not a statistic … so stop treating them that way. So often, the main thing we look at is how much traffic we get and how much our numbers rise month to month. In doing this, we forget that there are faces behind those numbers. If we’re not writing to those faces, we’re not doing our jobs. Period. The second aspect of being personal is related: remember that we’re part of our own audiences, too. Whoever your audience is, you probably count yourself as “one of them.” If you’re writing to writers, you’re probably a writer. If you’re writing to gardeners, you’re probably a gardener. Consider the difference between these two statements: “You need to consider your audience” versus “We need to consider our audiences.” One sounds like an accusation; the other sounds like a mutual journey. Consider the power of embracing our audiences as “people like us” instead of “people who like us.”

be inspirational

Inspire your readers. Give them something to think about. Change their lives. Blow them away. Create something they will find worth sharing with others. Imagine: What would happen if we focused on inspiring and motivating our audiences? What would happen if, instead of thinking “How can I keep my audience?” or “How can I keep my numbers up?” we thought “How can I motivate and encourage my audience?” and “How can I keep their passion up?” Then, write the answer to that question.

be cooler

I’m not telling you that you have to be the top content creator out there, or even the coolest writer out there. But there’s a lot of mediocre content out there, and a lot of people are writing the same things over and over. Be cooler than that. Take what others have done and make it better. Find your own unique bend on a familiar or popular topic. Be the person other people go to when they want “something different” on the same old theme.

Your Turn: What’s something epic you have in you? How can you be Effective, Personal, Inspirational, and Cooler right now? What’s the burning topic you’ve had in you? What does your audience need to hear today? Share what you think it means to be epic in the comments below, or share the most epic thing you’ve read recently and what makes it epic, so we have some examples to pull from!

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2 comments:

Can I be the president of your fan club? This post is perfect for me today. I am (often but don't tell anyone) whining in my head about not having much of a readership for my pet blog. I think about things that will "boost traffic" but have just about decided that writing that way is not the way I do things. I just want to write about, well, whatever I think of (and sometimes that is a hard thing to do). Thanks for this post.